There's been some discussion here lately on the desirability of including or deleting the article for some smallish private school. Actually, it's my impression that, over the couple of years I've been involved with the project, Wikipedia has been steadily moving in the direction of inclusionism in a number of subject areas, including schools, roads, pop music, and TV episodes. A while back, something had to be highly notable to be included in those subjects, but now there are articles on county roads, middle schools, upcoming as-yet- unnamed pop albums, etc.
So is this a good thing or a bad thing? At least in some areas, where there are bounded categories that are (fairly) well defined (one can always expect there will be a few edge cases though), there's some value to aiming for having a complete set of articles, even if some of them are of marginal notability and don't have all that much to be said about them. Some past U.S. vice presidents are pretty obscure now, but it would be good to have all of them anyway (do we?) We've got articles on all the popes (and various antipopes as well), though some of the early ones have practically no known facts beyond their regnal names and (sometimes approximate) dates of office. We've got all the U.S. census-listed places, thanks to an early "bot" run, and probably should aim to get similarly complete coverage of the rest of the world, even including remote villages of tiny population; it's useful in the aggregate to be able to look up any place (particularly when this is integrated into applications where you can click on a spot on a map for more information).
So, should we be just as complete for schools, albums, songs, TV shows, and so on? Would that just be duplicating IMDB, etc., or would it be helping to make Wikipedia a one-stop resource for more in- depth info (including links where appropriate to other sites like IMDB) on everything in each of these fields?
On 23/09/06, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
So, should we be just as complete for schools, albums, songs, TV shows, and so on? Would that just be duplicating IMDB, etc., or would it be helping to make Wikipedia a one-stop resource for more in- depth info (including links where appropriate to other sites like IMDB) on everything in each of these fields?
If it's third-party verifiable, why not?
(note: many people become AFD regulars just to enforce their disagreement with this notion.)
- d.
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David Gerard wrote:
On 23/09/06, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
So, should we be just as complete for schools, albums, songs, TV shows, and so on? Would that just be duplicating IMDB, etc., or would it be helping to make Wikipedia a one-stop resource for more in- depth info (including links where appropriate to other sites like IMDB) on everything in each of these fields?
If it's third-party verifiable, why not?
(note: many people become AFD regulars just to enforce their disagreement with this notion.)
- d.
Well, now that it seems that it is possible to enforce one's bias simply by overruling your opponents when closing an AFD (rather than convicing others to support your point of view) why do they bother?
Cynical
On 23/09/06, David Alexander Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
If it's third-party verifiable, why not? (note: many people become AFD regulars just to enforce their disagreement with this notion.)
Well, now that it seems that it is possible to enforce one's bias simply by overruling your opponents when closing an AFD (rather than convicing others to support your point of view) why do they bother?
It's possible to do all sorts of things; whether they do is another matter, of course.
- d.
On 9/23/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 23/09/06, David Alexander Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
If it's third-party verifiable, why not? (note: many people become AFD regulars just to enforce their disagreement with this notion.)
Well, now that it seems that it is possible to enforce one's bias simply by overruling your opponents when closing an AFD (rather than convicing others to support your point of view) why do they bother?
It's possible to do all sorts of things; whether they do is another matter, of course.
About a month and change ago, a few of us in WikiProject Louisville discussed the inclusion/exclusion argument (citing an essay somewhere that thoroughly presented all sides of the argument. If I remember right, one of the things we decided would be appropriate is having several anthology-style articles for defined groups of schools, especially at the elementary school level to avoid the creation of 80+ articles where the only thing truly "notable" about the school is the fact that it exists and who or what its namesake is. One of the pseudo-implementations of this is in the [[List of schools in Louisville]], where we have the public schools listed in table format with the year of founding (if we can find it conclusively) and a unique fact or two about the school and/or its namesake, again, if we can find it.
Carl
On 9/23/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
If it's third-party verifiable, why not?
- d.
Well, the reason that's always struck me as the most compelling, although I don't know that I've actually heard anyone use it (probably because I've been pretty successful in ignoring AfD), is that if we admit everything that's third party verifiable we will have expanded well past the point where our core group of editors is capable of enforcing our core content policies (particularly NPOV) on the amount of material we'll have. We may have already expanded to this point, for that matter; I certainly know that we've passed the point where we're no longer able to prevent a large portion of the articles from really sucking (see WP:CBM, especially the stuff that's been tagged for a year or more). This is a problem because people who see badly written or non-neutral articles as one of the first things they encounter at Wikipedia are probably either going to go away and not contribute or contribute stuff that meets the same description.
AaronSw's survey results have shown that most material is contributed by drive-by editors, but most formatting, wikifying, etc.--i.e. actually incorporating the new stuff into the encyclopedia--is done by core community members. Notability provides a method of callibrating the amount of incoming content at a level that our existing group of core editors can actually handle and assimilate. The question, in my opinion, when considering the inclusion of an article, is not "is this subject notable enough to be worth writing/reading about", but rather "if we include this subject and all equally notable subjects, will our regulars be able to enforce the core policies on the resulting influx of articles.
So, to get back to the original question of this thread, I think we should be concerned about the dropping inclusion threshold for pop culture at least, since that's an area where it seems to me that the community as it exists is not successfully enforcing important policies such as NPOV and whichever non-core-but- still-important policy says states that we want encyclopedia articles, not trivia piles. Some subjects aren't a problem; very few Rambot articles get taken over by hagiographers or POV warriors. A fair number of school articles do end up contravening NPOV. We should draw conclusions about the effect of including these various article types based on the current state of similar articles that we already have, and draw up whatever standards we need to make sure that we can manage the material we take on in that subject area in the future.
--Robth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)
On 24/09/06, Robth robth1@gmail.com wrote:
Some subjects aren't a problem; very few Rambot articles get taken over by hagiographers or POV warriors.
Town articles do get taken over by local boosterism. Look at User:Concrete Cowboy's fine work enforcing the Local Point Of View on any article to do with Milton Keynes.
A fair number of school articles do end up
contravening NPOV. We should draw conclusions about the effect of including these various article types based on the current state of similar articles that we already have, and draw up whatever standards we need to make sure that we can manage the material we take on in that subject area in the future.
Hitting with a verifiability hammer is a good first move for those. But if we start cutting subject areas because they attract POV warriors, then it's time to mark everything about Israel, Palestine or Linux for removal.
- d.
On 9/24/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Hitting with a verifiability hammer is a good first move for those. But if we start cutting subject areas because they attract POV warriors, then it's time to mark everything about Israel, Palestine or Linux for removal.
- d.
We don't cut subject areas, we just limit our depth of coverage to include only as many articles as we're capable of keeping in line with our core policies. Thus, for Israel-Palestine, we probably wouldn't want to have articles on, say, every single jailed Palestinian militant, since I doubt we have enough core editors to enforce NPOV on all of them. For schools, we wouldn't cut all school articles, but rather see how many we seem to be capable of maintaining in a neutral, verifiable state, and draw a line accordingly, probably based on the amount of independently published material. What I'm suggesting is basically to treat subject independently and determine how much material the community of editors that works on that subject is able to support; then come up with a notablility threshhold based on that.
--Robth
On 9/24/06, Robth robth1@gmail.com wrote:
AaronSw's survey results have shown that most material is contributed by drive-by editors, but most formatting, wikifying, etc.--i.e. actually incorporating the new stuff into the encyclopedia--is done by core community members. Notability provides a method of callibrating the amount of incoming content at a level that our existing group of core editors can actually handle and assimilate. The question, in my opinion, when considering the inclusion of an article, is not "is this subject notable enough to be worth writing/reading about", but rather "if we include this subject and all equally notable subjects, will our regulars be able to enforce the core policies on the resulting influx of articles.
I've always found it's a much simpler task to format and wikify an article than it is to run it through AfD.
Anthony
On 9/23/06, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
So, should we be just as complete for schools, albums, songs, TV shows, and so on? Would that just be duplicating IMDB, etc., or would it be helping to make Wikipedia a one-stop resource for more in- depth info (including links where appropriate to other sites like IMDB) on everything in each of these fields?
IMDB is not free content, so I don't think it ever makes sense to worry about whether or not one is duplicating IMDB. A duplicate of IMDB which is free content would be a good thing.
From a standpoint of practicality, I'd say moving toward being more
inclusive in these areas is fairly inevitable.
On 9/24/06, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
There's been some discussion here lately on the desirability of including or deleting the article for some smallish private school. Actually, it's my impression that, over the couple of years I've been involved with the project, Wikipedia has been steadily moving in the direction of inclusionism in a number of subject areas, including schools, roads, pop music, and TV episodes. A while back, something had to be highly notable to be included in those subjects, but now there are articles on county roads, middle schools, upcoming as-yet- unnamed pop albums, etc.
So is this a good thing or a bad thing? At least in some areas, where there are bounded categories that are (fairly) well defined (one can always expect there will be a few edge cases though), there's some value to aiming for having a complete set of articles, even if some of them are of marginal notability and don't have all that much to be said about them. Some past U.S. vice presidents are pretty obscure now, but it would be good to have all of them anyway (do we?) We've got articles on all the popes (and various antipopes as well), though some of the early ones have practically no known facts beyond their regnal names and (sometimes approximate) dates of office. We've got all the U.S. census-listed places, thanks to an early "bot" run, and probably should aim to get similarly complete coverage of the rest of the world, even including remote villages of tiny population; it's useful in the aggregate to be able to look up any place (particularly when this is integrated into applications where you can click on a spot on a map for more information).
So, should we be just as complete for schools, albums, songs, TV shows, and so on? Would that just be duplicating IMDB, etc., or would it be helping to make Wikipedia a one-stop resource for more in- depth info (including links where appropriate to other sites like IMDB) on everything in each of these fields?
-- == Dan ==
It is a complicated issue, and "inclusionists" have a very good point: if it is verifiable, why not put it in the encyclopedia? It's not like inclusion of one article hurts another.
I am sympathetic to this point, I am, but I really think that it only goes so far. The truth is this: we *are* an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias should only contain entries that pass atleast some level of notability. Otherwise, if we let just any school, company, band, movie, tv-show character, &c in, we are creating notability that wasn't there before. An entry in an encyclopedia gives the subject some inherent notability. In my opinion, this is not desirable if we are acheive the standard of other encyclopedias. We should be careful to not let ourself devolve into some mass of facts, because that does devalue the things that really deserve an article.
What I'm saying is, on a longer timescale, using WP:V as the sole criteria for inclusion does hurt the encyclopedia as a whole. One mans opinion, anyway.
--Oskar
On 9/24/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
It is a complicated issue, and "inclusionists" have a very good point: if it is verifiable, why not put it in the encyclopedia? It's not like inclusion of one article hurts another.
I am sympathetic to this point, I am, but I really think that it only goes so far. The truth is this: we *are* an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias should only contain entries that pass atleast some level of notability. Otherwise, if we let just any school, company, band, movie, tv-show character, &c in, we are creating notability that wasn't there before. An entry in an encyclopedia gives the subject some inherent notability. In my opinion, this is not desirable if we are acheive the standard of other encyclopedias. We should be careful to not let ourself devolve into some mass of facts, because that does devalue the things that really deserve an article.
What I'm saying is, on a longer timescale, using WP:V as the sole criteria for inclusion does hurt the encyclopedia as a whole. One mans opinion, anyway.
fortunetly we can mix it with NPOV to get "there must be enough stuf from [[WP:RS]] to produce a NPOV article" which means a reasonable number of sources.
On Sep 23, 2006, at 8:37 PM, geni wrote:
fortunetly we can mix it with NPOV to get "there must be enough stuf from [[WP:RS]] to produce a NPOV article" which means a reasonable number of sources.
That would be great, except that [[WP:RS]] is a steaming pile of shit.
Best, Phil Sandifer sandifer@english.ufl.edu
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
On 9/24/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
That would be great, except that [[WP:RS]] is a steaming pile of shit.
Then improve it.
On 24/09/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/24/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
That would be great, except that [[WP:RS]] is a steaming pile of shit.
Then improve it.
As you know, we've been through this discussion on this list recently: the problem is that it's being preserved by trench warfare and is at the stage where it needs bypassing. This is in progress.
- d.
On Sep 24, 2006, at 12:32 PM, geni wrote:
On 9/24/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
That would be great, except that [[WP:RS]] is a steaming pile of shit.
Then improve it.
I find that people who delete entire guideline pages (or any other pages) without warning get RFCs, and then later people bring those RFCs up on the listserv in bizarre attempts to sling mud.
-Phil
On 9/24/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I find that people who delete entire guideline pages (or any other pages) without warning get RFCs, and then later people bring those RFCs up on the listserv in bizarre attempts to sling mud.
Well I killed an entire policy page. I'm not sure anyone noticed. Certian didn't result in an RFC.
But going in guns blazing is a fairly classic example of macho stupidity (not that I'm saying that macho stupidity doesn't have it's uses).
People react badly to "this sucks therefor I'm going to kill it". Far better is to say here is a better option. And make sure that better option is fairly solid. Write it out. Redraft it. Find a couple of rule lawyers that you trust to find all the flaws in it and fix the most problematical ones. then figure out all your arguments as to why it is better. Then you make a move.
On 9/24/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/24/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I find that people who delete entire guideline pages (or any other pages) without warning get RFCs, and then later people bring those RFCs up on the listserv in bizarre attempts to sling mud.
Well I killed an entire policy page. I'm not sure anyone noticed. Certian didn't result in an RFC.
Out of curiosity, what page was it? Whatever it was, I'm assuming that it wasn't as important as WP:RS
--Oskar
On 24/09/06, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
People react badly to "this sucks therefor I'm going to kill it". Far better is to say here is a better option. And make sure that better option is fairly solid. Write it out. Redraft it. Find a couple of rule lawyers that you trust to find all the flaws in it and fix the most problematical ones. then figure out all your arguments as to why it is better. Then you make a move.
Yep, per the process essay. Yay politics!
- d.
On Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:08:12 -0400, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
That would be great, except that [[WP:RS]] is a steaming pile of shit.
The only thing worse would be not requiring reliable sources...
Guy (JzG)
On 9/23/06, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
So, should we be just as complete for schools, albums, songs, TV shows, and so on? Would that just be duplicating IMDB, etc., or would it be helping to make Wikipedia a one-stop resource for more in- depth info (including links where appropriate to other sites like IMDB) on everything in each of these fields?
Define "school". Under Michigan law, I was educated in a private school: the Vernon-Dunlap School. I can even cite sources that prove the existence of this school and that I went there; however, this particular "school" existed only because that's how the state of Michigan defined homeschooling: as a private school with a religious or philosophical objection to teacher certification. Should we have an article on it?
Define "album". Is a collection of a dozen songs by a teenage garage band, burned to CD and given to a bunch of their friends an album? Should we have an article on it? What if the band and album were mentioned in the "human interest" section of the local paper, making it verifiable?
Define "TV show". Is the weekly broadcast by the local high-school TV club on the school's five-watt transmitter a TV show?
Populated areas are generally easy to define, since governments have an interest in enumerating and tracking them. Most other things aren't.
On Sep 25, 2006, at 3:23 PM, Mark Wagner wrote:
Populated areas are generally easy to define, since governments have an interest in enumerating and tracking them. Most other things aren't.
Define Wikilawyering. And common sense. And being flexible instead of having hardline rules.
Then all of the hair-splitting becomes a lot easier to deal with.
-Phil
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Mark Wagner wrote:
Define "school". Under Michigan law, I was educated in a private school: the Vernon-Dunlap School. I can even cite sources that prove the existence of this school and that I went there; however, this particular "school" existed only because that's how the state of Michigan defined homeschooling: as a private school with a religious or philosophical objection to teacher certification. Should we have an article on it?
Yes. The unusualness (is that a word?) of this arrangement means that it would be inherently notable.
Cynical
On Sep 25, 2006, at 4:23 PM, David Russell wrote:
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Mark Wagner wrote:
Define "school". Under Michigan law, I was educated in a private school: the Vernon-Dunlap School. I can even cite sources that prove the existence of this school and that I went there; however, this particular "school" existed only because that's how the state of Michigan defined homeschooling: as a private school with a religious or philosophical objection to teacher certification. Should we have an article on it?
Yes. The unusualness (is that a word?) of this arrangement means that it would be inherently notable.
Home-schooling in Michigan is not unusual. That they put a "school name" on the books does not make a given home-school notable.
-Phil
On 9/25/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Sep 25, 2006, at 4:23 PM, David Russell wrote:
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Mark Wagner wrote:
Define "school". Under Michigan law, I was educated in a private school: the Vernon-Dunlap School. I can even cite sources that prove the existence of this school and that I went there; however, this particular "school" existed only because that's how the state of Michigan defined homeschooling: as a private school with a religious or philosophical objection to teacher certification. Should we have an article on it?
Yes. The unusualness (is that a word?) of this arrangement means that it would be inherently notable.
Home-schooling in Michigan is not unusual. That they put a "school name" on the books does not make a given home-school notable.
-Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
This does bring up the perfectly good point that even if we made a completely inclusionary policy, we'd still have "school like things" (Michigan home school pseudo-schools) which aren't really notable or "schools" by normal standards.
There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any record claiming they may be a school of some sort".
The first place that line seems logically to go, on first inspection, is "Paid teachers".
On 25/09/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any record claiming they may be a school of some sort". The first place that line seems logically to go, on first inspection, is "Paid teachers".
Third-party verifiability would be the first line.
- d.
On 9/25/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 25/09/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any record claiming they may be a school of some sort". The first place that line seems logically to go, on first inspection, is "Paid teachers".
Third-party verifiability would be the first line.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
In the US, due to the existing Department of Education (I started to type DOE and fortunately stopped myself) and related databases, I can verify the existence of all the schools in the country as of 2 years ago, and in most cases as of the beginning of this last school year.
On 9/25/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 25/09/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any record claiming they may be a school of some sort". The first place that line seems logically to go, on first inspection, is "Paid teachers".
Third-party verifiability would be the first line.
But where's the second line? The Michigan homeschools are verifiable: since they're treated as private schools, they need to be registered with the Michigan Department of Education.
On 9/26/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/25/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 25/09/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any record claiming they may be a school of some sort". The first place that line seems logically to go, on first inspection,
is
"Paid teachers".
Third-party verifiability would be the first line.
But where's the second line? The Michigan homeschools are verifiable: since they're treated as private schools, they need to be registered with the Michigan Department of Education.
This is all based on my experience and what seems logical to me. I could be dead wrong on this, but here goes:
I think the line is more toward organizational structure. Public schools are generally controlled by some kind of district board of education, not to mention that they usually have a principal and office staff, and often a decision-making committee of some sort. Parochial schools are controlled by a church, and private schools usually have some sort of board of directors/trustees. While home schools are _regulated_ by the appropriate department/board of education, they are not directly _run_ by that department/board of education, and I'm not thinking that they have an analogous board or principal/headmaster that the public and private schools have. While technically, the parents serve as the "board," they aren't exactly officially appointed/elected overseers in the same legal sense.
Speaking of legal, while home schools may register with their appropriate department of education, they aren't necessarily established as a legal entity in the same sense that public and private schools are.
Carl
On 26/09/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/25/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Third-party verifiability would be the first line.
But where's the second line? The Michigan homeschools are verifiable: since they're treated as private schools, they need to be registered with the Michigan Department of Education.
Make a list article, giving your verifiable source, I suppose. See if the school inclusionists rally to it on the inevitable AFD ;-)
- d.
On 9/26/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/25/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 25/09/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any record claiming they may be a school of some sort". The first place that line seems logically to go, on first inspection, is "Paid teachers".
Third-party verifiability would be the first line.
But where's the second line? The Michigan homeschools are verifiable: since they're treated as private schools, they need to be registered with the Michigan Department of Education.
What's verifiable, that they exist? The fact that something exists is not an article.
Anthony
On 9/26/06, Anthony DiPierro dipierro@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/26/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/25/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 25/09/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any
record
claiming they may be a school of some sort". The first place that line seems logically to go, on first
inspection, is
"Paid teachers".
Third-party verifiability would be the first line.
But where's the second line? The Michigan homeschools are verifiable: since they're treated as private schools, they need to be registered with the Michigan Department of Education.
What's verifiable, that they exist? The fact that something exists is not an article.
Because we have the notion that all schools are inherently notable, apparently the fact that something exists _is_ an article. Or, if you take the list approach, _part_ of an article.
Notability should be the first line, with criteria being such that only actual schools are counted (at a maximum). Such criteria could include: - A school tied directly to the government (i.e., public schools) - A school run by a board of directors/trustees or similar form of government. This does not include any strictly regulatory agencies such as a state Department of Education. - Accreditation by some board of accreditation.
Carl
On 9/27/06, Carl Peterson carlopeterson@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/26/06, Anthony DiPierro dipierro@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/26/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/25/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 25/09/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
There will have to be a line short of "all things that have any
record
claiming they may be a school of some sort". The first place that line seems logically to go, on first
inspection, is
"Paid teachers".
Third-party verifiability would be the first line.
But where's the second line? The Michigan homeschools are verifiable: since they're treated as private schools, they need to be registered with the Michigan Department of Education.
What's verifiable, that they exist? The fact that something exists is not an article.
Because we have the notion that all schools are inherently notable, apparently the fact that something exists _is_ an article. Or, if you take the list approach, _part_ of an article.
I don't really consider lists to be articles, but I also don't see a problem with lists. As for whether or not notability is enough to have an article, I disagree. Notability is, by definition, a necessary condition for an article, but it is not sufficient.
"Thomas Jefferson was a person" is not an article, even though Thomas Jefferson is an indisputably notable person.
Notability should be the first line, with criteria being such that only actual schools are counted (at a maximum). Such criteria could include:
- A school tied directly to the government (i.e., public schools)
- A school run by a board of directors/trustees or similar form of
government. This does not include any strictly regulatory agencies such as a state Department of Education.
- Accreditation by some board of accreditation.
How about just using common sense? If all you can say about something is that it exists, it shouldn't have an article about it.
BTW, I still haven't seen any evidence that "The Michigan homeschools are verifiable". This is probably true, but I can't confirm it.
Anthony
On 25/09/06, David Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
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Mark Wagner wrote:
Define "school". Under Michigan law, I was educated in a private school: the Vernon-Dunlap School. I can even cite sources that prove the existence of this school and that I went there; however, this particular "school" existed only because that's how the state of Michigan defined homeschooling: as a private school with a religious or philosophical objection to teacher certification. Should we have an article on it?
Yes. The unusualness (is that a word?) of this arrangement means that it would be inherently notable.
Ah, no. The *arrangement* is highly notable - an individual incidence of the arrangement isn't. We can and should write about the legal loophole Michigan uses to handle homeschooling; this doesn't mean that a single specific homeschool is notable, unless it's the only one that loophole applies to.
To use a different, and hopefully clearer, example... you know "John Doe"? The name comes from an archaic English law proceeding, which involved having to make up fictional plaintiffs and defendants in order to permit a court to hear land-possession cases.
The proceeding (a mixed action of ejectment) is very notable - not only did it give the English-speaking world a commonly used general-purpose name, but it made all sorts of interesting leaps forward in jurisprudence. But any individual case of it - this or that particular occurence of John Doe in a land register in 1342 - is not itself notable.
On 9/25/06, David Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
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Mark Wagner wrote:
Define "school". Under Michigan law, I was educated in a private school: the Vernon-Dunlap School. I can even cite sources that prove the existence of this school and that I went there; however, this particular "school" existed only because that's how the state of Michigan defined homeschooling: as a private school with a religious or philosophical objection to teacher certification. Should we have an article on it?
Yes. The unusualness (is that a word?) of this arrangement means that it would be inherently notable.
So every one of the tens of thousands of single-student private schools in Michigan needs an article?
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Mark Wagner wrote:
So every one of the tens of thousands of single-student private schools in Michigan needs an article?
Ah. I was under the impression that ALL of the homeschool students in Michigan were listed as attending that single school. Obviously if there is one school for each homeschooling family then no.
Cynical
On 9/25/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/25/06, David Russell webmaster@davidarussell.co.uk wrote:
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Mark Wagner wrote:
Define "school". Under Michigan law, I was educated in a private school: the Vernon-Dunlap School. I can even cite sources that prove the existence of this school and that I went there; however, this particular "school" existed only because that's how the state of Michigan defined homeschooling: as a private school with a religious or philosophical objection to teacher certification. Should we have an article on it?
Yes. The unusualness (is that a word?) of this arrangement means that it would be inherently notable.
So every one of the tens of thousands of single-student private schools in Michigan needs an article?
Are there really tens of thousands of them? Where is the list? I really don't think it's possible to comment in detail on this without seeing exactly what you're talking about.
Anthony
On 9/25/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
Define "school". Under Michigan law, I was educated in a private school: the Vernon-Dunlap School. I can even cite sources that prove the existence of this school and that I went there; however, this particular "school" existed only because that's how the state of Michigan defined homeschooling: as a private school with a religious or philosophical objection to teacher certification. Should we have an article on it?
Interestingly, Wikipedia *does* have an article on [[Vernon-Dunlap School]], a school in Michigan whose article doesn't preclude it being the same school you're talking about.
Anthony